Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block

Title: Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block
Author: Jesse Q. Sutanto
Published: April 28, 2026 by Berkley
Format: Paperback, 320 Pages
Genre: Women's Fiction

Blurb: Retirement should mean long-awaited trips to the sapphire waters of Santorini or careening down a sand dune in Dubai. For sixty-three-year-old Mebel, retirement means her husband of more than forty years announcing that he's leaving her for their private chef. Mebel isn’t sure who's the bigger loss.

Not to worry, Mebel has the perfect plan: she’s going to win back her husband. No one knows what he needs better than her—after all, she's been anticipating his needs their whole marriage. And if he wants a wife who can cook (why else would he leave her for a chef?), she will simply go to cooking school. Luckily, class at the renowned Saint Honoré School of Culinary Arts in France starts in just four days!

However, Mebel quickly realizes that her culinary school is not in illustrious Paris but rather in England—and some small village outside of Oxford no less. Despite the less-than-warm welcome from her much younger classmates, Mebel manages to befriend Gemma, the breakout star of the program, who offers to help Mebel on their first day. When Gemma stops showing up to class, Mebel knows she must figure out what—or who—caused her friend’s sudden disappearance. After all, Mebel may not know the first thing about how to cut a potato, but she certainly knows how to identify a fraud, and there’s definitely something fishy going on.

My Opinion: I’m beginning to realize that I enjoy senior characters in a way I never fully appreciated before. There’s a kind of steel in them, a lived in determination you just don’t get from the usual twenty something protagonists who are still trying to figure out how to hold a job and a relationship at the same time. Jesse Q. Sutanto was my gateway into this world with the Vera Wong series, and now, with Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block, she’s doubled down on giving us older women who refuse to fade politely into the background.

And Mebel… well, she’s a force. An absolute delight of a force.

Did I know, in some dusty corner of my brain, that entire generations of women were raised to be trophy wives? Probably. But Sutanto doesn’t just mention it; she shows it. She gives us women who were groomed to orbit men, to shelve their own dreams, to be pleasant, decorative, and quiet. And then she hands us Mebel, who has decided she’s done with all that nonsense.

Watching her step into her own life — loudly, hilariously, sometimes messily — is half the joy of the book. The other half is realizing how much she teaches everyone around her, including the reader. She’s outspoken, stubborn, and unexpectedly vulnerable, and in carving out her own path, she models what it looks like to claim space, to use your voice, and to stop apologizing for existing.

Is “senior coming of age” a genre? If not, it should be, because Mebel fits it perfectly. She’s discovering herself the way a young adult protagonist might, only with decades of baggage and a lifetime of expectations to unpack. This is a found family story, but with a twist: Mebel already had a family; she just didn’t realize how much she’d limited herself. Her new circle of friends cracks open her world, showing her that independence, purpose, and joy aren’t reserved for the young.

What Sutanto delivers is a story about reinvention at any age. About earning your own way. About standing up for what’s right. About realizing that who you were doesn’t have to dictate who you get to be. It’s charming, funny, and quietly radical in the way it insists that older women deserve center stage.

And Mebel, bless her, takes it.

The Book Witch

Title: The Book Witch
Author: Meg Shaffer
Published: April 7, 2026 by Ballantine Books
Format: Kindle, 320 Pages
Genre: Magical Realism

Blurb: Rainy March is a proud third-generation book witch, sworn to defend works of fiction from all foes real and imaginary. With her magical umbrella and feline familiar, she jumps into and out of novels to fix malicious alterations and rogue heroes.

Book witches live by a strict Real people belong in the real word; fictional characters belong in works of fiction…. Do not eat, drink, or sleep inside a fictional world, lest you become part of the story. Falling in love with a fictional character? Don’t even think about it.

Which is why Rainy has been forbidden from seeing the Duke of Chicago, the dashing British detective who stars in her favorite mystery series. If she’s ever caught with him again, she’ll be expelled from her book coven—and forced to give up the magical gifts that are as much a part of her as her own name.

But when her beloved grandfather disappears and a priceless book is stolen, there’s only one person she trusts to help her solve the case: the Duke. Their quest takes them through the worlds of Alice in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, and other classics that will reveal hidden enemies and long-buried family secrets.

My Opinion: I’m still not entirely sure whether The Book Witch is fantasy, magical realism, or something delightfully in between, but whatever it is, it scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had. It’s that rare reading experience where you close the final page and immediately want to flip back to the beginning, not out of confusion but out of sheer delight. I’m not a re-reader by nature, yet the moment I finished, I had the urge to start again just to catch all the breadcrumbs Meg Shaffer had been scattering while I was blissfully unaware. I absolutely did not see the twist coming, and I love it when a book gets one over on me like that.

From the very first pages, the structure hooked me: a book within a book within a book, each section heading doing quiet, clever work. Shaffer hides the best parts in plain sight, including what amounts to a sly little masterclass on how to write a mystery. She lays out the mechanics so openly that you don’t realize you’ve been handed the blueprint until the reveal snaps everything into place.

This is a story written for book lovers by a booklover. You can feel it in the imagination, the references, the way the narrative wanders through genres like a reader browsing their favorite shelves. It’s one of those novels where you promise yourself, you’ll read “just a couple more pages,” and suddenly you’re ignoring your to do list because you’ve fallen headfirst into someone else’s world.

Every character is memorable—truly memorable—and I already miss them. Their banter is sharp, funny, warm, and full of quotable lines that make you want to dog ear pages or reach for a highlighter. And beyond the mystery, beyond the twists, the book becomes a profound reading experience: a journey through stories we love, the emotions they stir up, and the conversations we have about them. It’s almost like being dropped into a book club tucked inside the narrative, where insights are shared, dots are connected, and perspectives shift in satisfying ways.

Will readers guess the twists early? I hope not. The surprises are the beating heart of this novel, and discovering them exactly when Shaffer wants you to is part of the magic.

When Breath Becomes Air

Title: When Breath Becomes Air
Author: Paul Kalanithi, Lucy Kalanithi
Published: January 12, 2016 by Random House
Format: Kindle, 208 and Pages
Genre: Memoir

Blurb: At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both—now with an epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi.

My Opinion: When Breath Becomes Air is exactly what it promises to be: a memoir written by a dying surgeon who loved learning, but loved language even more. And honestly, thank goodness for the Kindle dictionary, because Paul Kalanithi’s vocabulary is… a lot. You can feel the literature, poetry, and philosophy woven through every page; sometimes beautifully, sometimes in ways that sailed right over my head.

The book is brief, divided into the before, the during, and an epilogue written by his wife, Lucy. It’s emotional without being manipulative, heartfelt without being sentimental, and full of the kinds of messages you don’t realize you need until they’re suddenly sitting in your lap. The clinical precision of a neurosurgeon meets the vulnerability of a man trying to make sense of a life that’s ending far too soon.

I’ll admit, the more academic passages weren’t for me. But when Paul writes about his patients, his colleagues, his wife, his daughter, those moments glow. That’s where the book truly breathes. You can feel the love, the fear, the clarity, the tenderness. You can feel the man.

And yes, I know memoirs often give us the polished pieces and cast off the parts the writer wants to leave behind. I’m sure there were darker moments—anger, doubt, frustration—that didn’t make it onto the page. But if Paul chose to leave us with grace, curiosity, and a sense of a life well lived, even if cut short, I’m willing to take that as the legacy he intended.

The 11:59 Bomber

Title: The 11:59 Bomber
Author: Marshall Karp
Published: November 25, 2025 by Blackstone Publishing, Inc.
Format: Kindle, 368 Pages
Genre: Police Procedureal
Series: NYPD Red #8

Blurb: A bomb explodes in a crowded New York subway station at exactly 11:59 a.m. The next day, a second blast rips through a busy department store—again at 11:59.

As the bombs go off with clockwork precision, the death toll climbs and businesses shut their doors as the city hunkers down in fear.

NYPD Red Detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan face their most twisted case ever, as they race against the clock in search of one man who has vowed “to destroy New York City the way it destroyed my family.”

My Opinion: It has been over three years since The Murder Sorority hit shelves, and I’ll admit, I’d started to wonder if NYPD Red #8 was ever going to materialize. When The 11:59 Bomber finally appeared, I picked it up “just to see” if I remembered who was who. You know how that goes -- one paragraph becomes one chapter, and suddenly you’re halfway through the book, wondering when you last looked up from the page.

There’s something about this series that has always worked for me. Maybe it’s the humor tucked between the high stakes moments, or the emotional beats that land more often than not. Maybe it’s the trust detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan, and the whole high octane RED squad. Whatever that alchemy is, I was genuinely hoping it hadn’t faded during the long gap. Thankfully, the energy remains.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about this series is the multiple plotlines. For readers, like me, who get restless with straight line storytelling, this is a welcome relief. There’s always another thread to follow, another angle to consider, another moment where you think, “Okay, now this is where the squad shows its strength,” only to realize Karp has a few more turns planned.

By the end, a couple of interpersonal threads are left dangling, not in a frustrating way, but rather as an open invitation. If (or when) Karp decides to pick them back up, I have no doubt the series faithful will be right there, ready to see what the RED squad gets tangled in next. After a three year wait, I’m just relieved the door hasn’t closed on them yet.